From the author: This note is one of many notes that are published on the Detkino.ru website (a site for parents and about parents). The topic of passion for computer games is very pressing today. And this topic really worries our parents, it causes fear, internal panic... I hope that this note will help parents understand how worried they should be and how they feel about the behavior of their son/daughter who is interested in computer games. My son is 15 years old, he stayed in his second year in 9th grade, he plays games on the computer at home, skips classes, and behaves aggressively. In the middle of the school year, I turned to psychologists and there was no result, I had to go to a mental health clinic and my son was diagnosed with schizophrenia. My son was prescribed Zyprexa tablets, from which he began to eat a lot and gain weight. After being discharged from the hospital, I decided to stop taking the pills because... diarrhea started. And then a week later the body became completely dehydrated, and the son was admitted to an infectious diseases hospital. Tell me, maybe he doesn’t have schizophrenia, but gambling addiction? And what to do with it? (Natalia, Yaroslavl) Hello, Natalia! Thank you for your question. It’s hard for me to tell you what your son has: schizophrenia or gambling addiction, especially like this, without an in-person examination. But I can say that gambling addiction as an escape from reality, as a way of solitude, can be one of the symptoms of schizophrenia, and It can be a separate disease, a feature of the behavior of a dependent person, or a personality disorder. In short, the main markers of schizophrenia are as follows: 1. Thinking. distortion of mental activity, which can be expressed in the originality of judgments, endless resonating reasoning, often without semantic connections. Speech similar to fruitless fantasy.2. Behavior. Often these are stereotypical (repetitive) movements, actions (for example, walking around the room back and forth). Also in behavior this can be expressed in excessive pedantry (pencil to pencil, piece of paper to piece of paper). Any disturbance of order may be accompanied by increased anxiety, restlessness or hysteria.3. Communication with people. A person suffering from schizophrenia does not strive for any contact with people or peers. Communication is very formal. It is important for a person to be listened to; it does not matter to him how it is perceived by other people. There is some kind of emotional coldness in communication. These people find it difficult to establish emotionally close relationships.4. Sleep disturbance. A clear marker is that a person is increasingly unable to sleep at night. In some cases, up to several days. During those periods when he is sleeping, there is often an influx of delusional thoughts; a person can walk around the room and pronounce this stream of thoughts and words out loud. 5. Hobbies. Hobbies can be very strange and unusual in nature. It is important to understand that these symptoms cannot be considered separately from each other. It is important to observe the personality as a whole. I may not have named everything, but this is what you can rely on when observing your son. If you, as a mother, do not see all these signs and it seems to you that your son is adequate, mentally healthy, but has only excessive enthusiasm computer games, then it makes sense to visit a psychotherapist. If it turns out that there is no schizophrenia, then in any case the psychotherapist will be able to select a treatment for the boy that will make it easier to overcome his gaming addiction. Natalya, if it turns out that this is a gaming addiction, take it no less seriously. This is the same ailment of a person, this is what makes him suffer, suffer, a person does not belong to himself, he is captured by desires, he does not control himself in these moments. Therefore, medical help for gambling addiction is simply necessary. What are the causes of schizophrenia? This is the predisposition of the individual himself (special emotional sensitivity, a particular type of nervous system, genetic predisposition, i.e. there were such diseases in the family) and the conditions in which the child grows up in the family (upbringing according to